A jar full of coins

While sorting stuff in the bookcases to be replaced I found a jar full of coins. Kids were happy, especially Anna, whose interest in money is pretty strong at the moment, and since I also found her Dikkie Dik piggy bank standing empty. So I told them they could have the money if Anna counts it and Alexander helps her to divide it equally between the kids.

So, what has happened in the next hour?

Anna was learning how to count money (and how not to walk around with her piggy bank especially when she is very excited with the money there).

Alexander was practicing checking if a number could be divided by 3, writing decimals, helping Anna without doing the task instead of her and finding the easiest possible way to do calculations when I asked him to add up the numbers.

Emily was very sad that she didn’t have a piggy bank, so she wanted to go and immediately buy a pink piggy to store her part of the treasure. This is when Robert came to the rescue with the suggestion to build a pink piggy bank from Lego.

[In a couple of days] All three kids have 3,15 euro of the treasure and 3,09 shared, which is not enough to buy three ice creams of 1,50. Alexander found a way to take an equal contribution from everyone, but then had 1 cent left. Of course, I told him that it was not possible, given that 3,09 could be equally divided by 3.

So now we are at: different strategies to deal with the task, importance of estimations and checking if everything adds up, division by 3, addition and subtraction of decimals.

I’ve got multiple lives, in Russia and the Netherlands, as a practitioner, as a scientist, as a mother, as an educator, as a gardener… I write about things that call for it, but somehow it always ends up being about learning, boundary crossing and networked individuals.